Jim Penman argues that modern life has desensitized our dopamine systems. Drugs, gambling, and constant excitement deliver bigger dopamine hits than raising children, so people skip parenthood. Restoring dopamine sensitivity to family life is key to reversing the birth rate crisis.
Hi, I'm Jim Penman. I'm a businessman who's funded a research institute into, amongst other things, the birth rate crisis. Why are birth rates dropping? I've written previous books including Epigenetics and Character and Biohistory, about to release Birth Rate Crisis. Let's talk about dopamine. There is a problem in the modern world, and it's— what the problem is, is that people have become less sensitive to dopamine. And this is a reaction to prosperity and other things like that, things like drugs and alcohol and even competition and the falling of faith, they can all have these effects. What they actually do is make people less sensitive to dopamine. What that means is that the activities like family and children are becoming less attractive because our brains need lots and lots of dopamine surges to be satisfied. Something like drugs, alcohol, excitement, gambling, travel, adventure, all these things give you— give dopamine surges and they satisfy the brain. Whereas the family, children, community, these things only produce a little trickle of dopamine. So if your brain is insensitive to dopamine, you don't tend to want children and family, you want these other things. If it's more sensitive, then you want children and family. The key, what we've got to do, is to work out how to make people's brains more sensitive to dopamine, to reverse the character change that's been destroying our birth rate.
Rising mental illness and falling birth rates have the same cause, it is this.....
